Support Us!

Click here to support our fundraiser!

CAW is a worker-run anarchist journal of art, culture, and all the shiny things we can find!

We are welcoming seed funds to fully launch CAW, and for now we have a few shiny things to share, a site that will be filled with writing and other offerings over the coming weeks and months. 

Who are we?

CAW, a Collective of Anarchist Writers, a Corvid Appreciation Working-group, a cry of autonomy and freedom with many acronymic meanings, is launching! We want CAW to be an alternative arts and media platform built on the diverse writings, collaborations and offerings of carla joy bergman, Shuli Branson, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil. At present, all of us maintain individualized creative projects while navigating inconsistent waged-labor, carework, chronic illness, disability, and other forms of precarious living. We talk about the importance of mutual aid, group support, and taking care of one another in our political and organizing spaces, but the solitary practices of writing and the structure of the authorship economy has led us to neglect that most simple lesson when it comes to our creative work: we are stronger together than apart.

With CAW, we are creating a worker-run cooperative project that collectivizes the work we are most passionate about, thereby providing financial stability for ourselves and for each other. By offering it at a pay-what-you-want subscription cost, we hope to build an accessible and consistent base of support that will allow us to spend less time working for owners’ profits and more time creating resistance, beauty, and joy. And we’re excited to have found a way that our “individual” work might be able to facilitate that stability in the lives of the people we admire and love! 

We believe that if everyone takes what they want and pays what they can, together we will be able to produce a flourishing space for anarchist thought, culture, art, co-learning, podcasts, memes, zines and many other beautiful things as well. 

What we offer:

CAW will be a pay-what-you-can subscription-based site, which will also arrive as a weekly mailing list, that combines our regular ongoing projects, special featured writings, community offerings, and collaborative pieces. Your subscription will give you access to weekly columns, featured essays, culture reviews, podcasts and discussions, along with interactive possibilities including courses, book clubs, and a chat server. We are also building and maintaining an always-free zine, graphics, and sticker library for all your distro-ing needs! And there are other exciting surprises in the offing…

Solidarity funds!

To keep the webs of mutuality flowing, we will also use a portion of this money to support other projects that inspire us. A portion of the money from sustainers will be put towards supporting other writers, artists and cultural projects, prioritizing Indigenous communities of Turtle Island, Palestinian youth writers and culture workers, and BIPOC trans, non-binary and two-spirit creative projects. We will also use the opportunity of mutual funding support to highlight and amplify their work. 

CAW aims to put some of the fun and joy back into our creative endeavors as well as share these with you all— we are committed to displaying All The Shiny Things We Can Find!

Why Now?

The driving force behind this project is to offer exciting new perspectives on culture, life, struggle, politics and liberation while strengthening and amplifying the creative and generative labor each of us does towards those goals. Rather than stealing what spare minutes we can for our writing, rather than remaining self-entrepreneurs whose work competes against one anothers’ in a sea of individual subscription newsletters, we are coming together to create a worker-run collective space that can house all our wildest ideas, dreams, and boldest projects. We believe that creating an active culture of autonomy is an important piece of ending the dominance of the state and capital and empire, by countering the world of oppression with a world of joy and militancy. We hope to build a network of subscribers who want to engage with our work, and who are looking for a trusted, accessible platform for radical writing, one which we hope to expand to include more CAW members down the road. 

The freelance world leaves every writer to fend for themselves, to hoard their meager earnings rather than share resources, and to be on an endless search for diminishing opportunities to publish. This zero-sum pressure on individual workers is reproduced through massive material, ideological and political pressure after decades of established magazines, newspapers and publishing houses getting consolidated, ‘disrupted’, shuttered, or micromanaged by ultra-rich owners. We bring together our autonomous projects along with joint offerings to create a comprehensive space of liberatory writing and art, a haven for autonomous thought from below that is sustainable for the writers who maintain it, and one that is accessible for our friends and larger communities. 

We are doing this fundraiser to raise the seed money to begin in earnest  to get our project out there in the world, invite people to subscribe, and give us the necessary funding to expand this vision — which includes paying each of us for two days of labor a week, covering platform costs, and solidarity funds. 

If you are already a paying supporter of any of our work, when CAW officially launches in February your subscription will be transferred over*, meaning you will now get four times the writing, podcasting, art and culture for the same price.

*you can of course opt out at any time by cancelling your subscription

The next steps and how you can support us:

• Share this campaign far and wide!
• Donate to this campaign!
• Sign up for our Newsletter and become a paid subscriber of CAW once we launch (more information coming soon!)
• Check out CAW and be in touch with us. (www.cawshinythings.com)

“We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin

A little budget breakdown: $45, 000

THANKS! CAW!